#Personal – Learning to code with #Minecraft? start with Hour of Code, #MakeCode and Project Malmo

Hello!

December arrives and it’s time for one of my best moments of the year: Hour of Code. I have already written about this type of activities, and once again I recommend joining the community if you want to have a good time with children learning to program.

As always, Minecraft is an almost mandatory topic among the materials that have been created in recent years. As a parent, I can attest that all children have a special connection with the game and that when they see the possibilities of extending it, some people see a special shine in their eyes and want to begin to try this.

This year, I researched a little more and I’ve found a couple of other interesting options for this. In addition to the options we have on the Hour of Code page, we also have the possibility to use the materials created by the Microsoft MakeCode team. There is a special Minecraft mod in which we can interact with the Minecraft environment using visual tools such as Scratch.

Note: Scratch is the flow definition environment created and shared by a team in MIT. I’ve already wrote a little about this.

In this flavor, the editor has the pixelated Minecraft look and feel, and allows coding with visual blocks, dragging and dropping them into a blank canvas to create special Minecraft activities flows. This type of tools are ideal to start learning basic programming notions including variables, control flow, if statements, loops and functions.

We can also switch to some real and light programming scenarios using … Javascript !!! (yes, Javascript everywhere). IMHO it’s a nice option to describe how a visual flow will be written later in real source code (even if is Javascript)

And this are kids tools, if you are looking for a real development environment in top of Minecraft, Project Malmo is one of the best ways to start. You can do some serious coding using real programming languages like C#, C++ or Python. In their official website, Project Malmo is described as

The Malmo platform is a sophisticated AI experimentation platform built on top of Minecraft, and designed to support fundamental research in artificial intelligence..

And that’s it for today, I’ll wrote more about Project Malmo and this tools during the next couple of days, so be ready for fun stuff !!!Greetings @ Burlington

El Bruno

References

• El Bruno, Hour of Code: Learning to code with future generations
• Hour of Code
• Microsoft MakeCode
• Scratch MIT
• Microsoft Research, MakeCode and Minecraft
• GitHub, Project Malmo
• GitHub, Install Dependencies
• GitHub, C# Tutorial